Microsoft Teams Wants to Make Star Trek’s Universal Translator Real

Since Star Trek debuted in 1966, the many iterations of the franchise have leaned on a particularly useful piece of technology to explain how the crew of the Enterprise is able to talk with every alien race they encounter: the "universal translator," a gadget that allows instant communication across language (not to mention galactic) divides. Now, Microsoft is looking to make the universal translator real, and it’s using AI and Microsoft Teams to do it.

Called Interpreter, the feature was announced today during Microsoft’s 2024 Ignite conference, and is planned to begin public testing in Teams in “early 2025.” Like a news cast dubbing over a foreign speaker, Interpreter aims to provide “real-time speech-to-speech interpretation.” When enabled, Microsoft said, you'll be able to speak your native language, and whoever you’re calling will hear the language they best understand.

You can see the feature in action above, via a video shared by TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers. In the demo, Interpreter seems to kick in a few seconds after a caller starts speaking Spanish, immediately translating what he’s saying into English. Listen closely, and you’ll hear that the translation is even in an approximation of the speaker's own voice.

That second bit of tech wizardry is thanks to optional AI voice cloning tech, which Microsoft says is opt-in. Other details on Interpreter are scarce at the moment, but the company revealed that at launch, Interpreter will support English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. It’ll also be limited to Microsoft 365 subscribers, meaning free callers won’t be able to use it.

If your preferred language isn’t listed above, you’re not entirely out of luck: Microsoft also announced today transcribed translation support for 31 different languages, which means that 365 subscribers will see their AI-powered Teams transcriptions automatically translate supported languages into their own. Transcriptions will also add support for an additional 20 languages, although these will not translate to other languages out of the box.

Outside of translation services, Microsoft also said that Copilot in Teams will soon be able to understand and answer questions about visual content shared onscreen during a call, as well as summarize the contents of shared files without you needing to open them. Additionally, Copilot+ PCs will see a slight bump to call quality thanks to a "Super Resolution" upscaling feature, bringing us even closer to the view screen on a Starfleet vessel.